Being Alberta

Alberta's history is a long series of experiments in farming, in politics, and in energy. We remember some of them and we forget others. Those choices matter. In this episode, Terry Ross, who did his doctoral dissertation on Alberta innovation, helps us unpack Alberta's innovation systems. David King, a former MLA, situates those choices inside a longer political and social history. And Tom Keenan, a professor with a focus on innovation, follows a different front line. Computing networks and security showing how Alberta's habit of problem solving pushed it into fields like time sharing, the SuperNet, and cybersecurity. Together they help us place familiar stories of oil and technology into a wider frame that includes agriculture, medicine, the arts, and everyday institutions that make experimentation possible. Henry George Glyde, a well-known Alberta artist, painted a mural for the University of Alberta, which captures the early province through a narrow lens. Settlement, grain, cattle, and a horizon of promise. This episode asks what happens when we widen the frame. To do that, we turn to three Albertans who think about innovation in different ways. What unites them is a shared conviction that the stories we tell about ourselves matter. Matter what

Happens to a group of people will play out largely based on the Story they tell themselves about what's happening and how they see themselves and the story we look at has an awful lot to do with how we're going to be able to succeed so sometimes one of the things i think that i wish we remembered we're really good at in alberta is actually like finding a good narrative to build around and i think there's a bit of alberta's narrative and self-identity that's building over a little bit of the american background and story so there's a little bit of the dna and the people that created the pre-1905 self-identity of what does it mean to be part of the world and what's going on here in some ways i fear that we could almost maple light ourselves when it comes to innovation thinking that we're somehow entitled to innovation or it's just somehow good fortune and in reality we've been very smart with keeping peace and good government we have a natural resource base and we've had the good fortune of the american empire and the british empire to export into right so we got a lot of wind at our back

Alberta has often imagined itself as the last of the west open land new starts and a horizon where the old rules from ottawa or london do not fully apply that self-image borrowed heavily both from a British colonizer model and an american frontier mythology but it also reflected local realities a sparse population harsh climate and long distances that made cooperation a necessity that combination produced both resentment towards external control and a willingness To try new institutional arrangements when the old ones stopped working

Albertans are familiar with that classic political caricature of the huge cow straddling most of canada that was eating hay in alberta and being milked in ontario things like the terror fight nationally in 1896-97 those things were disruptive of life in western canada and i think that it is correct to say that political innovation arose out of disruption in many cases in 1935 i would say the emergence of the social credit party was the result of two kinds of disruption one was the scandal that engulfed the ufa but the other one was the depth of the depression in 1971 when the conservatives formed the government i would say that that was the result of again a two aspect disruption the sense that alberta was moving from a rural community to an urban community and the sense that it was time for a younger generation to replace an older generation in the political dynamism of the day in 1930

When control over natural resources was transferred from ottawa to the province those same habits and institutions could be applied to hydrocarbons gas from turner valley later oil at leduc and ultimately the oil sands were not just lucky finds they became the focus of province-wide experiments in regulation research and revenue sharing work by people like carl clark and bitumen separation and the later industrial build-out around fort mcmurray set on top of that political and institutional groundwork rather than

Replacing it they required so much work to get to a point of economic viability they drove so many things but then also the economic return in an environment like alberta with very philanthropic kind of donations of civic leaders who've done well in this industry are very wealthy and so you sort of have an ecosystem that is somewhat friendly because there's high net worth individuals who are willing to support the arts you've got a lot of high net worth individuals who can go out and support culture and do these kind of things part of it is that there's fertile soil as a result of the innovations that are spilling over from a healthy economy royalties

And spin-off wealth underwrote research councils new faculties in medicine and engineering arts organizations throughout the province and philanthropic funds that back everything from museums to community foundations but the same mechanisms that allowed alberta to move quickly into oil could over time make it slow to move

Beyond it i think that our reliance on oil and gas has actually forestalled innovation i think there is some evidence that we've become so reliant on them that there's an inertia of momentum along the trajectory that is determined by oil and gas law heed for example was beginning to make the argument that innovation would have taken us somewhat away from oil and gas and yet the reality is that in the province oil and gas has continued to be dominant and even when we fall on hard times in alberta we tend to think about getting back to the good old days if we strip

Away nostalgia what exactly made innovation possible here in the first place some Of the answers are material a large hydrocarbon deposit a strategic position in north america existing rail and pipeline routes others are institutional universities research councils arm's length agencies a habit of forming cooperatives when individual action was too weak others are cultural attitudes to risk to newcomers to expertise ross gives us one way to hold all of these together well it's

Really interesting i almost want to use an analogy of an innovation system even in the region it's a little bit like a kitchen what are the conditions that makes you a good cook well you need to have great ingredients you need to have the skill to know how cooking works the chemistry the tools and you got to have a recipe and a vision and then maybe you sort of aggregate up to be like a restaurant in a lot of ways i think it applies to a region as well so in alberta's context what we had that made us unique and that was a big deposit of hydrocarbons that were a huge engineering challenge and so they were sort of a precursor for a big innovation mission because if we don't hack this innovation mission we won't be able to get to market and amongst that there are a lot of things like entrepreneurial attitude its position in the commonwealth and the confederacy of canada that sort of all give it its own character all of the conditions for innovation i think exist almost everywhere it's more about the bespoke flavor of what they are in a region and what can be brought to bear what you have in terms of innovation assets depends so much of the collective narrative and the story of the people that can control those assets or access them if they look at a pile of natural resources and they don't see the potential they're not going to support policies to take it in that direction we've been mapping

Those conditions for innovation ingredients markets and institutions but conditions don't choose their own priorities at some point people have to decide which problems matter how much risk to take on and how to protect long-term work from short-term pressure i think

That leadership is critically important now one of the things that i would say is that i believe wholeheartedly that leadership and followership are opposite sides of the same coin you cannot have a great leader unless people around him know what followership is including for example speaking truth to power on the one hand or that the leader gets as much out of the followers immediately around him as he may give to followers around him so i think that alberta has been blessed with leaders in different fields from time to time the fact is we've almost always had enlightened people they haven't always you know had their stories straight about how how we should do this and we can argue that the SuperNet wasted money and so on but the reality is the hearts of albertans have always been in the right place we've never been luddites or drag our feet or something and the economic incentive has always been there again i attribute a lot of it to the resource industry they definitely want to do things very efficiently they want to make the most money possible it's true of every company but there's something special about the resource industry they will definitely adopt something and there's no hesitation about it banking drags their feet you know try to if you have fraud in your credit card try to deal with that i guarantee you if the credit card companies were headquartered in alberta there would be a more efficient way to dispute credit card charges so the alberta idea that hey there's a problem we're going to go solve it is magic it's powerful and parts of this country don't really have it

There is a deep anchoring of very intelligent and ambitious people in alberta that have chosen to call her to home if i were to go ahead and think about some of the biggest names in terms of what you might say would be institutional entrepreneurs or figures who had really outsized impact in bringing together missions and visions that brought public and private activity towards outcomes hm tory carl clark Peter Lougheed in their own way all worked really good and i think amongst all of those people who took very big leadership roles in doing what they had to do there were a lot of other people probably from different domains who were telling them hey there's an opportunity over here and so those unsung people who got the ear of those individuals to go and do the things that they did are really important as well the figures we've been hearing about are not just

Clever individuals they represent different kinds of leadership inside the same system in alberta's case tory used the university as a moral and technical project pushing research and education out across the province carl clark built a dedicated research capacity around the oil sands laugheed used the tools of government to turn resource revenues into agencies and funds with specific missions in energy medicine and culture

I certainly think Peter Lougheed was a leader and what leaders do in this relationship with their followers or with the community generally is that they draw out the story that gives people joy and a sense of creating a future they draw out a story that gives people a sense of joy a sense of agency and a sense of looking forward to the future henry marshall tory did all of those things he drew out a picture he gave people a sense of agency and he caused them to think about the future i think abraham did the same thing i think Peter Lougheed did the same thing you may have seen an old youtube video of what looks like a music festival all kinds of people sitting on the grass on a slope listening to music one person gets up and others still on the ground tend to look askance at that one person until a second person gets up and joins the dance and then a third and a fourth and that's what is critically important obviously no one would be dancing except for the first person up but on the other hand the whole crowd would not rise to its feet and dance until the second the 10th and the 15th got up to join the first and what i would say about delegation is that you can delegate and then disregard or you can delegate and continue to pay attention to the outcome of your delegation peter never delegated and disregarded the delegation thereafter peter delegated and you knew that he was going to continue to be interested in what you were doing seen

Through that account Lougheed looks like a textbook case of a transformative leader someone who could frame a shared story for the province attract collaborators and use new resource Revenues to build institutions that outlived his own government that invites a harder question how much of that trajectory depended on law heat himself and how much on timing if a different premier had won in 1971 someone like harry strome facing the same oil and gas expansion the same constitutional powers would alberta's innovation agencies research funds and cultural investments have looked roughly the same or Very different i wonder

What he would have done if he did not inherit that because that's one of those bespoke opportunities right you are just so lucky if you walk into the leadership position of a province that has an undeveloped natural resource with global relevance that could have fallen apart for a lot of reasons because again even getting a austra which was one of the key if not the key to unlocking all of the techniques that the underground deep stuff needed without that sort of leadership of putting the other programs to hack that maybe there just would have been nothing happened for a while because the cost of production would have been too high and it just would have sat as an undeveloped resource there would have been no doubt alberta's treasury would look very different gee it's like peter lying he'd ended up with getting three aces right in his hand but he still could have screwed it up or there could have been other people that could have screwed it up big opportunities are fragile

Especially when the work is slow technical and expensive the real test is whether a government can create a container strong enough to hold that kind of effort

Do you know one of the things that i think was most important that Lougheed did in terms of setting up particularly a ostra but it's one of the constructs that i explored in my dissertation and it was this idea of arms lengthiness and it was this idea that he really wanted it to be set up from term to term political meddling and so it was given a very clear innovation mandate you gotta hack the economics of these oil sands deposits using these tools and you report directly to the legislative assembly you don't even report to a minister but over time that is a very bold and i guess untenable political position for an innovation agency to hold because it ended up reporting then to a minister and then through a minister and got dragged until it became a little bit of a program so part of the innovation dynamic in alberta which you could argue is its confidence in the innovation agency model and when it does set up an arm's length agency with a clear innovation mission and a mandate with the right scientists or knowledge base to work on it and then in the right position of government so it's got separation from those kind of concerns difficult

Problems like cracking the economics of deep bitumen required stable long horizon efforts and the freedom to fail we Can see the same logic operating in other domains in agriculture and animal health for example alberta drew on figures like bob church whose

Work in animal genetics bridged ranching veterinary science and human medicine he was a rancher but his impact on i.t was huge right so if i had to do this all over again and look into another superhero the story of bob church would be incredible

Bob church uh giant in animal genetics knew more about bull semen than anyone will ever know but he also had a heart he was on the university senate he did all kinds of great things for the universities all of the universities and he definitely is one of the reasons i think we have a vet school here there's no question one of the insights is that the same diseases that affect your cow affect you so there's this continuum and so the zoonotic diseases as they're called are going to be important to humans so everybody wanted the vet school but the university of cal we got it partly because of the insights and foodie bob churches that it's really just a different branch of medicine and you have a med school and a good one and when

I was seven years old my brother and i had bought our first purebred heifer and unfortunately her first calf had to be pulled and a cesarean and we weren't allowed to be there but we snuck Into the barn and we saw this calf being cut out of the this mother and that just impressed me how does life start so that's how i got into genetics and that's how i got into biology and that's how i got into medicine it was always saying well why and why why does this happen to me and

Why does that happen what starts as a personal question becomes over time a public system training research programs professional standards and rules designed to prevent harm but once programs take form what do they protect and what do they unintentionally crowd out i think that people have a responsibility and they can do a much better job than rules and regulations and i'm afraid that when all these programs become very much regulated all you do is you regulate out the innovative ideas that will be our success for the future what exactly are public institutions for compliance or problem solving Decades before church henry marshall tory argued that a university in a small resource dependent province had to be more than a teaching institution it had to be an engine that linked research publication and practical problem solving

Across the province who was charged with creating and nurturing the university of alberta really took as his model the idea of the extension university which may have originated with land grant universities in the united states but he certainly nurtured the u of a into a very very significant extension university his proposition was that any of the research that was done at the university of alberta should be taken out to the public of alberta in one way or another i think it had an influence on our agriculture it had an influence on our silviculture our forestry industry and i suspect that it had a great influence on others as well well it's an

Interesting thought because it's the idea that institutions are sort of these formal and informal norms and so there's this idea that there is kind of a very non-public marketplace for certain kinds of connections capabilities resources and the origin story of many of the innovation agencies came from well connected well-respected individuals lobbying and making a personal connection and so maybe the story of innovation sometime that's underappreciated is more like the one-on-one conversations between two people with extreme capabilities within arm's reach that then can see things that can really make things happen i mean it's kind of the great leader hypothesis i think about innovation but this is more about great institutional changes or the innovation expressing itself in the landscape of what is possible for innovators to play with in a province innovation in alberta has depended on a dense

Mix of factors natural endowments yes but also institutional design leadership choices and collaborative habits

When you're a frontier community you've got to do things together a lot of our innovation was collaborative we may have been the third jurisdiction in canada to allow women to vote but we were the first jurisdiction in which women were actually elected we elected louise mckinney and roberta mcadams when you look at the united farmers of alberta in 1921 displacing the liberal party they came out of a collaboration of farmers and the history of the united church tends to talk about the union of three denominations the methodist the presbyterians and the congregationalists but in western canada it was community churches that emerged in small towns and villages because there were never enough people in a small community to be the church of one denomination and those community churches on the prairies were just as much a significant contributor to church union in 1925 as were the denominations that we're accustomed to talking about small towns and villages in alberta had a lot of community non-denominational churches you know and you go past 1925 you think about rural electrification natural gas co-ops rural telephone all of those so i would contend that in alberta we've seen a lot of innovation that has come out of collaboration a

Theme running through all of these stories is that institutions don't Just enable innovation they also create momentum once you build a system around a mission it starts to pull talent money and attention towards certain kinds of solutions i would love

To see a narrative of alberta where they look at the natural resource base and go yes we're going to export this but we're not just going to look at it as just the resources of today i would be looking at how can we broaden it and for an example all the infrastructure that might be going into oil and gas in different ways a lot of it might be playing around with brine that has lithium in it so again all of a sudden it's like all this knowledge all this infrastructure that was about hydrocarbon burning all of a sudden has applicability in this green ev electrification market and similar things like the enhanced oil recovery technology doesn't seem all that far off from carbon sequestration so it's like looking at what we have and how it can grow into new kinds of value production but here's the really cool other part those are really good things that are stuck to alberta because there's are going to still be innovations that are going to go up or down as the hydrocarbons go up or down but they will bring together nerds that will start companies in other areas you might bring in someone who does really interesting algorithms for reservoir visualization an energy nerd and then they leave that energy job and go start a medical visualization company and create something that exports across the world and lives in alberta because they like it so look at our oil and gas and our natural resources as not just something to take and export make money with today but it can direct nerds and doing some innovation but that pool of nerds can be even upgraded further that would be what i'd like to see more albertans thinking about the story we tell about alberta's assets shapes what we fund what we train for and what we learn to ignore which is why the innovation lens only works

If we keep asking the harder question what paths did these choices open and what did they close in this Episode we've looked at some of the conditions that allowed innovation to take hold in alberta frontier communities building co-ops and community churches universities and research councils testing ideas in agriculture medicine and the arts and governments that sometimes use resource income to fund long-term experiments in the oil sands health research and in digital networks the people you've heard from have stressed that none of this was automatic it depended on how albertans interpreted disruption how they organized leadership and follow worship and how they chose to shape institutions around specific missions those choices opened some paths and closed off others even so this is still a partial picture at the start of the episode we looked at henry glide's mural and the stories that leaves out our work now is similar to notice which stories about innovation get painted on the wall which ones are still missing and how wide we want the frame to be.